


Fall

by jadeopal



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Death, Limbo, M/M, OR IS IT, Tragedy, dream - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 00:52:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10503015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadeopal/pseuds/jadeopal
Summary: In a hospital in Switzerland, a man with the first initial E hasn't woken for a long, long time. Worlds and eons away, the same man lies beside his slim, dark-haired lover and says, "How did we get here?" And yet further worlds and eons away, he whispers into his sleeping lover's shoulder, "I love you."Sometimes we have to take a leap of faith. Sometimes, we have to stand by and watch as those we love take leaps of faith without us.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd because I wrote this at 1AM, half-delirious with sleep and just coming off an adrenaline high from reading a depressing as all hell 00Q fic, and I just couldn't bring myself to reread and edit for coherency/logic. Oh well. Hopefully you get the idea. I realized too late that one of the plot details means the ambiguity is kinda shot to shit, but, you know what, as long as it isn't outright declared, the ambiguity can thrive on. Right? Right.

In a hospital room somewhere in the depths of Switzerland, a man lies on a bed, surrounding by whirring machines and IV drips. He has an oxygen mask fixed over his face; a motorized machine beside him pushes air in and out of his lungs, breathing a breath every other second for him because he can no longer do it himself. Nurses come every hour to turn him, careful not to disrupt the tubes running into his veins, the connections that keep him alive.

In the hospital records, he’s recorded as E. Levine. Every few weeks, another man comes to visit. Sits in the bed by the table with his laptop, tapping away in the silence of the room. Sometimes he’ll look up and stare at the sleeping man’s face with exhaustion deep in every line of his face, and his lips will thin before he finally goes back to his laptop screen. This visitor has no fixed schedule. He comes on holidays, weekdays, weekends, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes bright and early in the morning, sometimes only arriving when the sun is already high in the sky. Sometimes he stays for the full day, eating nothing, sipping from the large coffee he always arrives with. Sometimes he stays only an hour, two, before snapping his laptop and standing up.

Every time he leaves, he leans over the sleeping man’s body and brushes his lips gently against that smooth, relaxed forehead. “You fool, Eames,” he whispers, before standing back up, unruffled as always in his pressed three-piece suit and leaving without another glance.

  1. Levine became a full-time resident of this hospital on July 29, 2013. The date now is July 29, 2017. Yet the pale, lanky stranger with his laptop and perfectly creased suits hasn't stopped visiting once.



 

-

 

The job that starts it all is simple enough. Three levels down, a light enough sedative this time around — _thanks, Yusuf_ — that they will still be able to wake up even if they are killed due to complications. Arthur double, triple, even quadruple-checked to make sure of this.

It’s a simple extraction, in-and-out, but on a man with a paranoid streak to rival even Arthur’s, not that Arthur is paranoid, thank you very much, he simply prefers being prepared. But the point is that it’s not quite as simple an extraction as it’s intended to be, so naturally their covers are blown in the dream and Eames, still in his forge as the mark’s soon-to-be-late mother, gets shot three times in the chest — lethal blows. His body is gone before it hits the floor. Arthur joins him minutes later, a bullet through his skull while he's trying to hold off the mark’s subconscious to give the extractor time to open the mark's subconscious's safe.

 

-

 

When Arthur wakes, Eames is already pulling out his Somnacin drip, wincing as his careless movement tears at his skin. Arthur takes just as little care as his, but he doesn’t even take the time to wince; already the extractor, a spunky woman named Margaret but who enjoys being called Marge, is blinking awake.

“Out,” Arthur hisses, already packing up the PASIV. “We have twenty minutes before the sedative wakes up, _if_ he doesn’t decide to just shoot himself awake. We need to get out.”

Eames helps him pack up while Marge scribbles down the information she was able to acquire while the mark’s subconscious was turning her into Swiss cheese. Arthur shoots off a text to the architect, _complications, information acquired_ , and then the three of them are scattering off to their hotel rooms to lay low for the night.

He doesn’t even notice until he’s half-asleep that his hasty removal of the Somnacin drip left no mark on his arm — well, no more than usual. Funny, he thinks to himself, rubbing at it absently, usually those cause fairly substantial bruising or scabbing, but he doesn’t get to think any further before he’s slipping asleep.

 

-

 

They’re at a resort somewhere in Cuba,  Arthur and the wide expanse of Eames’s skin, his curling black tattoos, the saltiness of his sweat, indulging themselves for a few weeks before they have to return to the dreamworld for their next job.

“You’re like a cat, darling,” Eames laughs one morning when Arthur stretches lazily in bed and practically purrs in contentment. This is the best way to wake up, with the sunlight already streaking in through the window and warming the bedsheets, the love of your life close beside you, propped up on his elbow and watching you with mirth dancing in his eyes.

Arthur mock-pouts and tilts his face up. Eames complies and gives him a fleeting kiss; that’s all they’ll be trading, kisses like the touch of a butterfly wing, before they brush their teeth and get rid of their morning breath.

“In another life, perhaps,” Arthur breathes out against Eames’s lips, and feels him vibrate with low, rumbly laughter. Arthur smiles at him through the hair flopping over his eyes, and in this room, this moment, right here and now, everything feels so perfect, so _complete_ , and he is filled with such warmth and contentment that he can’t quite believe it’s real and he says so— “I can’t believe that this is real, that you’re real, how did we get here?”

And Eames’s smile dims a moment, his eyes going soft and contemplative, before he blinks and it all slips away. Replaced by his usual grin, framed by those cheery, dancing eyes.

“Better than a dream,” he proclaims, and ducks in for another of those fleeting kisses. And Arthur closes his eyes and lets him.

 

-

 

Arthur is in his hotel room, digging through the mark’s financial records, when his phone rings. It’s the middle of the night, Taipei time, and he pauses to check the caller ID before picking up. Neither the extractor nor the architect for this job are night owls, and the chemist went and buggered off as soon as all the chemicals were delivered and ordered.

“Eames?” Arthur says once he accepts the call, and he doesn’t bother disguising his surprise. “What’s happened?” Because usually, when they’re on jobs, they don’t bother calling each other. It’s too dangerous — not because their calls might be traced and their relationship discovered, but because they can never know what situation the other person is in, and whether it’s safe for them to take a call. They leave their pillow talk for when they’re actually able to share a pillow; anything else would be impractical.

Eames’s resulting laugh is breathy, a little more strained than Arthur would like. “Oh, it’s nothing, darling, don’t you worry about me. I just needed to let you know— I might be a tad late to Barcelona, this job’s gone arse-up. Someone tipped off the mark, there was gunfire and car chases, you know how it is.”

“Jesus.” Arthur abandons his computer a moment — the mark’s records of his Viagra purchases can wait — to turn all his attention to their conversation. “Did you make it out all right? Are you in a safe location?”

“Please, Arthur, have some faith in my abilities. I am not entirely incompetent, you know,” and there’s another huffed laugh, “but it was the darndest thing, really, I was lucky to have gotten out of there with hardly more than a few scrapes. We were in our cars, they were just a little bit out behind me, and we were crossing an intersection — at a green light no less — when out popped an enormous truck and plowed right into both of them. T-boned, straight on. I got right out of there, of course, but if it weren’t for that truck, I may have more than a few scratches on me now.”

Arthur frowns, if only to quell that rising tide of worry in the back of his throat. “Well.” He coughs. “I’m glad you’re all right now. Call me if you need anything.”

“Another insult to my abilities? I’m simply charmed.”

Arthur rolls his eyes and can’t help the slight smile that rises to his lips. “You know what I mean. This job’s been going fine so far, no unexpected surprises, so if you need anything...”

“I know.” And Eames’s voice is practically bursting with sincerity when he says, “I can always trust in you, darling.”

Arthur smiles. Closes his eyes, and leans in to that voice, husky and smooth, in his ear. “It goes both ways.”

 

-

 

The next time they’re together they’re in Barcelona and Eames is a week late. Arthur is sitting in their flat’s living room, reading a newspaper, when he hears a key turn in the lock, then another, then another, and then the beeping of the security system being dismantled before the door opens.

Arthur doesn’t look up from the article he’s reading. “You’re late.”

“To be fair, I did warn you, darling,” and then Eames is behind him, slipping a warm, slightly damp arm around Arthur’s shoulders. Arthur wrinkles his nose and instinctively pulls back.

“You’re wet. Why are you wet?”

Eames laughs again, not nearly as breathy as when he called Arthur all that time ago to tell him he’d be late to Barcelona, but still with an undercurrent of strain. “It is raining outside, darling, which you’d know if you ever bothered to open the bloody drapes.”

“Is it, now.” Arthur turns and drags Eames down for a kiss, then frowns. “Your hair isn’t wet.”

Eames is grinning again, almost shy — not an expression Arthur is used to. “Funny story. I didn’t notice it was raining till I got off the train, and there I was standing at the train station thinking to myself, buggering fuck, I didn’t bring an umbrella with me, Arthur is going to be so upset when I get home—”

Arthur kissed him again. Eames returned the kiss, passionately, then broke away to continue his story as if nothing had happened.

“--and then I turned and looked beside me and, turned out somebody had forgotten their umbrella on the bench behind me. Strange coincidence, innit?”

“Nice coincidence. I do hate kissing you when you’ve been in the rain.”

“Hmm.” Eames is still smiling when he leans down for yet another kiss, but something is off.

Arthur lets it carry on a bit — they’ve been separated months, he’s not _that_ cold-hearted — but just when Eames’s hands are roaming down his chest and beginning to tug teasingly at his buttons, he pulls back.

“What’s wrong?”

Eames smiles at him, bright and false as the peppiest of any his forges. “Nothing, darling,” and he kisses Arthur again before he can protest. That’s fine. If Eames doesn’t want to talk about it now, Arthur won’t make him; eventually the truth will come out. Until then, Arthur is perfectly happy to carry on with their kissing and to let Eames slowly pry open the buttons of his shirt.

 

-

 

It’s a few months before Arthur and Eames are working together again. This job’s a little trickier, a little more sensitive. High-level corporate espionage on a militarized mark. Not the hardest they’ve ever faced, but certainly not the easiest, either. They do test run after test run to test Eames’s forges, the architect’s maze, the chemist’s Somnacin mix. Part of Arthur’s duties as point man are to volunteer himself as guinea pig for these experiments, which he does willingly, but one day he wakes up from a test of the Somnacin’s mix vividity to find Eames staring at him with a disconcerting focus.

Arthur feels his face. Nothing seems out of place.

“Is something the matter?”

Eames seems to jerk himself out of whatever reverie he’d caught himself up in. He shakes his head, runs a shaking hand over his face.

“No. All’s fine.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow at him and waits. Finally, Eames sighs.

Staring down at the floor, he asks, hesitantly, “How.... How does it feel? Waking up?”

The question throws Arthur for a loop. How is he supposed to answer?

“The same way it always does.”

“Does it feel...”

Arthur waits. Eames squirms, fidgets, glances off to the side and resolutely avoids meeting Arthur’s gaze.

Finally his patience runs dry. “Does it feel _what_ , Eames?”

“Does it feel different?” he blurts out, and instantly seems to regret it, drawing back into himself, his face growing shuttered off.

Arthur, himself, has no idea what has just happened. He can feel his brow scrunching in confusion as he asks, seeking-- _needing_ \--clarification, “Does what feel different?”

Eames sighs, shoulders drooping in resignation. “The dream. Does the dream feel different from here?”

Arthur stares at him, watches him as he determinedly stares off into the distance, far from Arthur, and feels something cold and heavy settle in his stomach.

“Why wouldn’t it, Eames?” When Eames refuses to answer, his mouth thinning into a tight line, Arthur swings his legs over the side of the recliner, seizes Eames by the arm. “Eames. _Why wouldn’t it feel different?_ ”

“Fuck it, it doesn’t matter,” Eames snaps, yanking himself free, and then stalks off out of Arthur’s view. Arthur watches him grow, and that weight in his stomach grows.

He rubs absently at his forearm until he realizes what’s he’s doing, then stares down at his smooth, unmarked skin.

No scabbing. No bruising.

That’s normal, he tells himself. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

_Not always._

 

—

 

They’re together in their Paris condo, looking out over the city, when Eames says, quietly, “I don’t think we’ve woken up.”

Arthur holds himself steady, forces himself not to stiffen. Nestled as he is against Eames’s chest, he knows the larger man would feel it.

“You’ve checked your totem, haven’t you?” Arthur says, quietly. “You know this isn’t a dream.”

Eames laughs, short and harsh. “I don’t have a totem, darling. Forging has always been my totem.”

Arthur twists in Eames’s arms, cups Eames’s face in his palms and holds it steady. Staring into those green eyes staring, in turn, distantly into space.

“This isn’t a dream.” Arthur says it quietly, firmly. With a certainty that cannot be denied. “I still have my totem. I know this isn’t a dream. Just try forging; it won’t work. Because this isn’t a dream. This is reality, Eames, and I need you to believe that.”

For a moment, Eames doesn’t reply. His jaw tenses, relaxes, tenses, in pulses, until finally he exhales, a long and shuddering breath.

“I know, darling.” He buries his nose into the crook of Arthur’s neck. “I know. I know.”

Arthur wraps his arms around him, and tries to ignore the fact that it sounds like a lie.

 

-

 

Some time later he’s driving madly down the streets of London — _fucking Qiwei, he should’ve known she’d sell them out, how had that not shown up in their research_ — with three cars following, fortunately, a fair distance behind. He makes a wild, screeching turn — _thank God for 3AM traffic_ — onto a side road, and spots, out of the corner of his eye, another alley right beside him. Unlit, almost impossible to see, it’s the perfect hiding spot. He’s lucky he saw it, really, but he doesn’t bother dwelling on his luck as he pulls himself into it with a heart-racingly tight turn, and then shuts the car off and waits, heart pounding, breath panting, as the three cars streak past him.

He waits a few minutes to be sure they won’t be coming back before he turns the car back on and pulls out, heading to the train station. It isn’t safe to return to his hotel room to retrieve his clothes, but that’s okay, he has his laptop and the PASIV on him right now and that’s all he needs.

A memory niggles at the back of his mind: _I was lucky to have gotten out of there with hardly more than a few scrapes, if it weren’t for that truck—_

He shoves the memory to the back of his mind, squashes it down. Coincidence. Coincidence and luck, that’s all it is. He doesn’t know London that well anyway, it stands to reason that there are some nooks and crannies he wouldn’t know about.

 _Strange coincidence_.

He drives to the train station, not thinking a thing the whole way there.

 

-

 

It piles up.

One of his favorite donuts left at the coffee store when he goes in to buy breakfast. A streak of green lights when their architect is kidnapped and he needs to get to her location before her captors can do more than rough her up. Discovering roads he didn’t know about that are perfect shortcuts to where he needs to go, finding his marks’ information with a little too much ease, job after job with minimal risk, next to no fuck-ups, hardly a single accident or surprise.

Most incriminating, though, is when he wakes up one morning next to Eames to find the larger man already wide awake and staring at the ceiling. Arthur burrows into his side, nuzzling his chest, and stills when Eames says: “Arthur, how did we get here?”

And in those lazy, early hours of the morning, with the drapes drifting in the breeze and the sunlight just filling the room with light; with his cheek pressed to Eames’s chest, his eyelids heavy, his mind still hazy with sleep; Arthur cannot quite find the answer.

 

-

 

They are back in Paris. It’s been weeks since their last job, and if Arthur has anything to say about it, it’ll be weeks before their next. It’s been far too long since the two of them have been able to simply spend time with each other, doing nothing more than reveling in the other’s company.

(He doesn’t think about how, the night before, he’d woken in the middle of the night to find Eames clutching him to his chest and silently weeping. Doesn’t think about how, in the blackness of the night, unaware of Arthur’s silent attention, Eames had pressed kiss after kiss to the top of Arthur’s head, with whispered “I love you”s interjected between kisses like punches. Doesn’t think about how, long after Eames had gone back to sleep, salt still drying on his cheeks, he’d lain there in the silent darkness and felt something icy weigh down his stomach like a glacier.)

Arthur leaves Eames in the condo to pick up pastries from the bakery down the street. On his way back, he stops by a newstand and picks up a news magazine. _Le 29 juillet_ it reads on the top, right under _Courrier International_ , and Arthur hums to himself as he flips through the pages with one hand, holds onto the box of croissants and petit fours with the other.

He’s reading an editorial on the refugee crisis, _Qui se souvient encore de la “route des Canaries”?_ and approaching their condo when he registers shouting. Panicked screams. He looks up, and there’s a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, larger than he might expect for the average amount of traffic this street receives on a weekday afternoon. As he draws closer, he can begin to make out their cries: _112, quelqu’un appelez 112, vite,_ and the box of pastries falls to the ground.

There is shattered glass on the ground. Shattered glass, he notes, as he shoves his way through the mob of people, shattered glass, and when he breaks through the crowd to the space they’ve formed at the center, lying on top of the shattered glass is a familiar body.

 

-

 

In a hospital room somewhere in Switzerland, a man sleeps. His arms are stained with bruises from carelessly removed IVs; his chest rises and falls with steady, shallow breaths. The band around his wrist reads _E.E., 2013,_ and sitting beside him, face pale, suit wrinkled, hands folded white and tight in his lap, is a lanky stranger.

The stranger stands stiffly. He moves carefully, as though every movement hurts, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. His eyes are red-rimmed, and it seems to take every ounce of determination he has to not fall over, but still he musters up the energy to bend down to the sleeping man’s ear and whisper

_Wake up, Eames._


End file.
